system with teacher-directed teaching, and traditional methods were used. At present, schools and teachers have more freedom with an overwhelming range of possibilities. There is more flexibility and focus on individuality. There are different schools, and traditional education is being broken down from bigger bundles of knowledge into small segments that can be mixed and matched to suit the needs of each prospective learner (the so-called learner-centered teaching). Are all schools and teachers ready to make good choices, evaluate their options and understand the responsibility that choice brings and the consequences of their decisions? I do not know because when we consider the advances that have been made in technology over the past 20 years, it is difficult to recommend what I like to change at school or in education now. According to different surveys, Estonian education system ranks among the best education systems in the world; according to OECD’s international survey PISA Estonian students rank 1st in Europe in all three domains of assessment. Schools have their success stories. So do foreign language teachers and teachers’ associations. Now it is your turn to share your expertise and know-how. Our foreign language teachers should be more active sharing their expertise and best practices at conferences in Estonia and outside it. It is no secret that sharing best practices is an excellent way to improve the performance, make your school/association visible and, apart from that, introduce Estonia, Estonian schools, language teachers’ associations, language teaching and language policy to the wider world. Ene Peterson was interviewed by EATE Committee members
Reading Recommendation HOW DO WE TALK THEN? Kärt Roomäe
MA student, University of Tartu
Enfield, Nick J. 2017. How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation. New York: Basic Books. It can be argued that spoken language reveals more about the deeper patterns of our cognition than writing. Human language was created through conversation, and there are many languages in the world that do not have a written form. However, in everyday life, we generally pay little attention to how exactly we talk, or how others perceive what we are saying. Have you ever considered, for example, how can conversation be compared to group work? How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation, a book published in 2017, was written by N. J. Enfield, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. While having been written by an academician, this book is clearly intended for a general audience and is not a collection of scholarly articles. It is a 257-page hardback, so not very light-weight, but not too much of a commitment either thanks to its relatively short length, making it accessible for reading. The main claim of How We Talk is that fillers like oh and huh form a salient part of exchanging ideas and cooperating while talking to other people. These little words in addition to glances, pauses, and changes in tone, even though often frowned upon, give the speakers a chance to gather their thoughts, among other reasons. Those are sometimes used seemingly unconsciously due to the speed of cognitive processing. 62
